


The Change

by FriendlyCybird



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Beholding, Character Death, Compulsion, Gen, Original Character Death(s), S4 era, Temporary Character Death, The Stranger - Freeform, Voluntary Compulsion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2021-01-08 01:43:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21227720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FriendlyCybird/pseuds/FriendlyCybird
Summary: Statement of Elise Whitehead, regarding the multiple deaths of Anastasia Atkinson, and how it changed them both.





	The Change

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kimaracretak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/gifts).

It seemed a bit inconsiderate that the only refrigerator at the Institute was occupied by the lunches of regular employees when there were about four people who actually lived there. Unfortunately, as the Magnus Institute wasn't licensed as a residence, they couldn't exactly make it known there were people living in the basement so stocking the refrigerator or even so much as purchasing a new one for the basement was...well... 

There was a time, Jon reflected vaguely, as he left the station and started in the direction his phone indicated had a grocery store nearby, he could have alerted Elias to any need for the Archival Staff, however ridiculous seeming, and it would have a shot at being granted. A part of him almost missed that. Of course, back then, groceries would never have been on the request list. About the strangest thing he'd ever needed to ask Elias for was to update the fire suppression system.

It was a normal enough grocer. Jon pulled out a cart and started in. He really shouldn't be here, shouldn't be out among people at all. People who might have stories. People who might be prey. All the same, he was going stir crazy in the basement, and he was feeling a bit better today. He'd woken up feeling strong that morning. The hunger had died down, he hadn't even felt like having a statement before he left. 

He knew he ought to focus on the non-perishables, but he thought there was a higher chance he'd be forgiven if he came bearing a treat of fresh fruit, so he turned into the produce aisle and instantly regretted it. 

She was standing by the apples, studying them, and she looked up at him the moment he looked at her. The moment her wide, dark eyes met his, he Knew. What's more, there was a strange sort of feedback loop, and he Knew that she Knew and something happened here that Jon had never experienced before and there was a little rush that passed between them. Like standing directly in front of the vent outside a fast-food place. 

"Oh thank _fuck_" the girl breathed, dropping an apple back on the pile and abandoning her cart to rush over to him. Jon startled when she grabbed him by the arm and dragged him back out of the store. He cooperated willingly enough. Even eagerly, once they were outside. She led him around back of the store, where she sat on a low, concrete wall and he sat beside her. "I don't know who you are," she began, letting go of him. "But I Know I can tell you." Then she stopped and "I can tell you, can't I?" 

"Please do." he said, before he could stop himself. He should warn her. Be honest with her. Dimly, he remembered when Jude had laughed at him. Compared him to a lost lamb walking into a butchers shop and declaring itself not stupid. If he had that sadistic streak to him, perhaps this girls relief would be similarly amusing. Instead, all it did was ignite the guilt in his gut enough for him to offer the preface "If you would risk it," before lacing power into the command "Tell me everything." 

She dropped her head back, short dyed red hair touching her shoulders, exposing her neck as she groaned with relief. Jon could feel it. The weight of a secret lifting. Then she met Jon's gaze again, and began speaking. "My real name is Elise Whitehead. I've been living as Anastasia Atkinson for the better part of two years now. The real Anastasia Atkinson is dead. For good this time, I think. For her sake I hope, but I can not tell you how I'd love to see what's become of her if she managed to rise a tenth time.

The first couple of times, we joked she was like a cat, you know? Nine Lives. Ana had ten, in all. If you count the first. Only Nine after she started changing, I suppose. After I started changing. This is already weird, let me start from the beginning."

Weird was an understatement, this wasn't how Jon had expected the story to begin. Death and Resurrection wasn't what he'd felt when he looked into Elise's eyes. 

"The first time Ana died, it was normal. Sad, but normal. None of us, our friends, saw it coming exactly, but we weren't really surprised either. Ana always lived like she was chasing something. The next thrill, the next adventure. A landsailing accident seemed fitting for her. I'd known her since primary school, so I got to speak at the service and I said as much. At first when she came back I thought it might be my fault. 

I looked down into that open casket, where her eyes were closed, so peacefully, as if she were just taking a nap after a hard run, and dared her to get back up. It wasn't quite the laugh I wanted it to be but...things like that were more a joke between Ana and I anyway. We had...such a morbid sense of humor between us. Probably why she came to me. 

The first time there didn't seem to be any real change. She was just. Back. She was alive again and who was I to question. ...Of course I questioned. My Dead Friend was Alive Again. She questioned too. We broke into the morgue where she'd been kept, into the funeral home...nothing. 

She moved into my family's basement. I didn't tell them she was there. That...may have been a mistake. I don't know how they would have taken it if they knew. My dad certainly didn't take finding her there very well. He swears she attacked him, but when she came back she didn't remember him finding her at all. No surprise there. He'd caved in her skull with a golf club.

She still came back though, but she was...bald, on that side of her head. And the skin underneath...felt strange. Like...like it wasn't quite skin. At least not...human skin. And underneath, it didn't feel like bone. Ana didn't like me touching bit but...I touched it all the time. It got to the point that she always made me sit on the other side of her. I just. I had to figure out what it was that side of her head was made of. 

I tried to reason with her. Tried to tell her it was our only clue to figuring out what was happening to her but...Ana just...didn't want to know. I couldn't believe it. She just...wanted to have a life. She was doing all these little, anonymous internet jobs. Feeding all the money into my bank account. It wasn't a lot, and there was no way it could actually ever finance her pipe dream of getting a flat somewhere far away. I let her pretend anyway, and goaded her into spending most of the money on takeout instead. 

I feel like you can see where I'm going with this. The third time she died, it was my fault. I didn't mean to. I didn't realize that cutting into the soft tissue she had instead of skull while she was asleep would...hemorrhage...like that. She looked up at me with the most...betrayed expression. She didn't remember, of course, and came back to me anyway. I told her it'd been my dad again. She believed me, because, really, that'd been...really, really stupid. It wasn't even like I could do anything with the sample I'd taken. I wasn't a science student. I didn't have...convenient access to microscopes or testing equipment. I just. Stashed it. I wanted to figure it out. 

She was different after that though. Maybe she didn't remember consciously but...she'd still flinch away from me more than ever. Sometimes she'd...look at me with mistrust. It was hard. Especially because I knew I deserved it. Here she was, coming back from the dead, different every time, slowly turning into some kind of monster, and she looked at me with suspicion. We had a huge row about it. I ended up accusing her of actually attacking my dad when he killed her. So she left. 

Turns out all those months hiding her were completely unnecessary. Her parents shaved the rest of her head, got her a wig and sent her back to school. Her funeral had been small, so for the most part she got away with a few "The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated" jokes. Those of us who were there though...we knew something was wrong. 

I knew I should say something. Stand up for her. I just...wanted to see how this would go. What...really happens...when the dead come back to life? I felt like I'd been running interference for her for too long. She wasn't my problem, really, I just wanted to know what happened to her. It...turns my stomach to think about. Like that's how I justified it to myself but really...I think I knew how the social experiment would turn out, I just wanted my hands clean when she turned up dead again. 

It was...pretty brutal too. She still had...loads of discoloration when she came back. On her face and neck. She'd been...beaten and...strangled with a chain. She didn't come to me, she didn't go back to her parents either she just. Came back to school looking like...well. Looking like a corpse. I asked her why she was back, and wasn't she afraid? Not sure I'll ever forget her answer. She said "No, They Are." 

And it was true. Everyone was terrified of her. She wasn't...different. She wasn't evil. She was still just a normal student. Still had a pulse. She could still walk and talk and smile and eat...but the bruising never went away. She didn't bother to cover it up either. She just. Lived like that. 

I don't know how I knew when she got attacked again. I just did. It was only a couple weeks before graduation, and I woke up in the middle of the night just. Suddenly, horribly _aware_ that Ana was dead again. That it wouldn't last, and that she'd come back worse then ever. I couldn't sleep the rest of the night, but there was nothing else I could do. Nothing else I wanted to do, except find out what she was going to do when she woke up. So I got up, and went out to find her. 

I didn't realize at the time that there was something to how easily I found her. I didn't realize that I was changing just as quickly as she was. That by...fixating on her changes without helping her anymore I was becoming something even more monstrous. I was there when she woke up in a gutter, just standing over her. I offered her a hand to help her to her feet, like that was some great charity. 

The fact that I can means I should spare you the details that came after. It's a good sign I think. You don't need to know every detail, and that's good. I have enough control of my words to tell you that it just...went like that. Anastasia would die, and I would watch, and she would come back, and be tortured, and I would watch. It didn't change when we graduated. I got a job in a shop, but I had no idea how Anastasiya was getting by. I do know she died twice before I really...reconnected with her again. I saw it both times.

Not in person, you understand. I saw it in dreams. When I checked with her later it was...exactly what had happened though. I dreamed about Ana obsessively. Even started taking naps during the day after work so I could check in on her. It wasn't like, live play what was happening now, just repeats of whatever was significant. It was always horrific. She took to wearing makeup to cover the bruising, of course she did, but she never did get it to quite match her skin tone, and layered on as thick as she needed it, it always looked...a bit unnatural. Besides, everyone knew her name by then. Her story. She was a curiosity at best, a freak at worst. 

I didn't contact her until after she murdered Thomas Wilson. I saw it in a dream and...I hadn't believed the dreams. Not really. However obsessed I was with them...I Mean, of course I believed them, or..." 

She stopped, rather suddenly, and exhaled hard, seeming to struggle for the right words. Jon blinked at her. That didn't often happen while someone was giving a statement. The right words seemed to just come to them, the Eye compelled them. Elise seemed to be fighting with herself though, and Jon wondered if, despite her relief at seeing him, she had begun fighting his compulsion. 

She began again. "Belief is a funny thing. You never really have it, or don't. You either want it, or don't. You have to choose to believe and you can't do that unless you want to. Once you have no choice than it's not a matter of believing anymore, is it? At that point you just...know. You have some sort of evidence, even if it's not evidence you can explain to anyone else. I wanted to believe my dreams about Ana were real. I wanted to believe I could see her, that I was keeping tabs on her in my dreams. She was - well, she was never my best friend. But ever since her accident, she'd consumed my life. I was obsessed with her. With how she has changed. With what her change was doing to her. 

Then I watched her choke the life out of a man I barley knew. He was a bit older. Worked as a groundskeeper for the park down the street from my house. I didn't even know his name until I saw it in the paper the next day. He'd come up to her in his park, friendly as anything, asked a couple questions about her 'condition'. She just snapped. 

I went straight to her. Don't even know how I knew where she was, I just did. I went to her and told her she needed to clear out. She'd be the first accused, the town's resident zombie. She started to say no but then I...I offered to go with her. Just took my entire savings, packed up and...we left. Traveled a bit, city to city by bus or train. I didn't even bother to quit my job at the shop. 

It was fun. Despite the change, despite knowing what she'd done, it almost felt like old times. Just us, talking and laughing? Sometimes she'd get quiet though, and I'd Know. I'd know she'd hate that I knew it was her. I'd know she hated me. She hated the people that stared at her more. Of course people stared. She was...a mess. Bruised and still half-bald with one eye constantly bloodshot. She looked like she'd been in the worst sort of fight. She hated it when people offered sympathy. Or worse, charity. 

Sometimes she'd kill them. Sometimes they'd kill her in self defense. It was strange to me that she never got any less...fragile, for her immortality. She came back again and again. We just kept traveling. Eventually I ran out of money and started relying on my credit card. That's...the fake name, by the way. I'm in so much debt under my real one. 

One morning, I woke up in a motel, cheaper than some of our earlier haunts, and Ana was gone. No note, nothing. To my surprise, even wide awake I knew exactly where she was. I could have gone after her, she was just at the bus station down the road. She'd swapped out her ticket for one going back home. 

Ana had died eight times by then. Total. The ninth was breaking into our small town's city hall to wipe out the entire records room. The tenth was in a house fire with herself, her parents, and mine inside. It was...weird...how little I felt. I was sad, of course, but I was mostly fascinated, that she made sure my parents were over. I couldn't tell if she hated them because my dad rejected her, or if she was doing it as some sort of revenge against me. For Knowing her."

Elise sighed heavily and closed her eyes a moment, then opened them again and met Jons. "Be honest with me." she said. "How much am I going to regret telling you all that?" 

Jon took a deep, shuddering breath. He felt more satiated than satisfied. As if it was more important that the information had gone through him than where it was going. And if he was interpreting the source of it correctly, that was most likely exactly true. "Probably quite a bit." he admitted. "But, thank you." 

She gave him a small, half-smile "Any time." she replied. "That's just one of my stories." Jon gave her a curious look and she shook her head. "The others are less...personal but." She heaved a hard sigh and shook her head again "I'm exhausted. I don't know who or what you are but whatever you just did...I..." she trailed off "It felt...well..." She slid off the wall and got to her feet. Then she reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. 

Jon didn't mean to press into the contact. He hadn't meant to interact with this woman at all. She was like him though, in so many ways, he hadn't been able to resist. He didn't know what to make of it when she added "It felt like a dream." and wandered off. He didn't even see whether she went into the grocers or not. 

Jon just sat on the wall for a while longer.


End file.
